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Part's artistic maturity made Melanie Hamrick's Waltz and Maria Riccetto's Mazurka and Pas de Deux (with Maxim Beloserkovsky) seem half-done and amateurish in comparison. The recipient of a great deal of critical attention lately, Hamrick's indeed beautiful, but she often dances with a fledgeling's indistinct focus and unsure phrasing, as she did here. While the dark, Italianate Riccetto is stong technically, she carries her arms with a weightless lack of consequence antithetical to the mood of this ballet, and rendered even less appealing when contrasted with Part's grandeur. Perhaps not surprisingly, only the elegant and refined Maxim Beloserkovsky matched Part's artistry, slowly scooping the air with his billowing sleeves in his Mazurka solo, with a softness and poetry which hinted that he, too, was dreaming up his encounter with these supernatural maidens. As for the corps, if anything they seemed less invested in invoking Les Sylphides deliberately archaic perfume than at this revival's premiere a year ago; it saddens me to see this onetime pillar of ABT's repertory reduced to a graceful, quaint cutout.

After Sylphides came the unlikely pairing of two duets, Jerome Robbins' Afternoon of a Faun and the Corsaire pas de deux. David Hallberg continued a triumphant season. Tall, leggy and blond, he gazed into the invisible mirror behind which we, the audience, sit, with a simmering yet cool mix of narcissism and affectlessness. Preening and posing, bare-chested, before the mirror, Hallberg is so beautiful it almost hurts to look at him, yet his cool blue eyes bespeak, not the sensuality of his movements, but the cold and hungry evaluation with which every dancer regards his reflection always measuring, measuring, measuring. While Stella Abrera's dark, Filipina beauty rivals Hallberg's own, she's depressingly hard edged, and turned in another performance of carefully plotted calculation. Faun is filled with moments of impulsiveness and surprise, as when the girl freezes in her tracks when she sees the boy's reflection, and realizes she's not alone, or when she pulls her gaze away from the mirror to confront his flesh-and-blood self directly; or when the boy, about to depart the studio, suddenly turns and plucks the girl away from the barre and carries her in a pretty lift across the room. Then there's the climactic moment when the boy kisses the girl on the cheek, an impulse which threatens to destroy the studio's sacrosanct isolation from the outside world of love and lust, which aren't always pretty. No wonder the girl immediately leaves. Never did Abrera appear to be surprised by anything Hallberg did, including that unheralded final kiss, and moved as if following a carefully prepared itinerary. This "by-the-numbers" approach sucked away any sense of spontaneity from the ballet, and killed any sexual tension that might otherwise have built between the two. Oh well, at least half of the performance was wonderful.

In Corsaire, Paloma Herrera and Angel Corella worked the audience into a frenzy with a performance stronger on tricks and charisma than artistry. I admired Herrera's lavender tutu, with embroidered peacock feathers down the front of its skirt, perhaps more than her dancing, which, while strong and brilliant, was hard-edged and over-baked, as was Corella's slave. Corella's magnificent double-split leaps, corkscrewing pirouettes and high-voltage smile were quite overwhelming in the friendly confines of City Center, a much shallower and smaller house than the Met; I'd have enjoyed Corella more if he wasn't also incessantly selling his tricks to the audience, which really needed no persuasion to roar its approval.

The final performance was ABT's revival of Twyla Tharp's magnificent In the Upper Room, set to the thundering and endless arpeggios of much the same Philip Glass score as Jerome Robbins used for his very different Glass Pieces. First performed by Tharp's own company in 1986, and by ABT in 1988, In the Upper Room is a sizzling, relentless work of near-ceaseless motion and energy, evoking those heady late days of the "Dance Boom," where Tharp and other avant-garde choreographers worked to create a synthesized vocabulary dazzling and joyful in its eclectic inclusiveness. In nine segments, Tharp works with two ensembles of dancers (ten in all), one in ballet footgear, and the other in jazz shoes, to tear through an amalgam of movement comprised of everything from pointe-work, jazz and tap, and the high-energy pumps and jabs of boxing roadwork (at the time, Tharp was quite enthralled with boxing, hiring a trainer to put her through rigors worthy of a Rocky Balboa, and incorporating bits of what she'd learned into her work).

Although pure dance, In the Upper Room is also stunning theatrically. Jennifer Tipton's original lighting design uses huge billows of smoke, which, at first, almost entirely fill and obscure the stage, becoming a volume of sheer light when illuminated by blinding lights arrayed in the wings. At first, you can barely make out the dancers, who seem to materialize out of the shadows as if by magic. Even when the smoke clears, somewhat, later in the ballet, it never quite dissipates, and this ballet is a stunning mix of engulfing lights and shadows. Norma Kamali's costumes also change as the ballet progresses. At the beginning, most appear in loose pants and tops, covered in black-and-white stripes. As dancers exit and return in new sections, they shed the striped costume bits, with the women reducing themselves to bright red skirts and leotards (and toe shoes for the ballet contingent), finally paring down to just a leotard. Similarly, the men shed their shirts (revealing that some, at least, could use a bit more time in the sun!). Although this device can be overly cute if mishandled, here it contributed to a sense of watching these dancers grow and change, as if through a long journey. Yes, In the Upper Room is long, but utterly engrossing.

It'd take far too long to recap all the dancers, but I particularly enjoyed the very under-used Michele Wiles as one of the jazz-shoe girls. Tall, blonde and with endless enthusiasm, Wiles is a paradigm of the leggy cheerleader type Balanchine found so entrancing. Lately Veronika Part seems to be crowding Wiles out of the tall-girl roles, and there's a repertory of ballets Wiles would just eat up at NYCB, which is on the verge of a ballerina drought. I know it'll never happen, but I can already see Wiles in Who Cares? Among the jazz-shoed men, Sasha Radetsky seemed almost too frisky in places, but I missed his charm elsewhere this season (alas that a business trip deprived me of seeing his Champion Roper). In the ballet contingent, Irina Dvorovenko again showed her affinity for Tharp's style. Tharp's work has always benefited from dancers with strong personalities (remember Baryshnikov in Push Comes to Shove?), and Dvorovenko's diva instincts serve both herself and Tharp magnificently. (In ABT's revival of Push a few years ago, only Dvorovenko managed to show any real sign of life, in Martine van Hamel's old role.) Here, wearing Kamali's red leotard and toe shoes as if showing off her favorite color (you wouldn't doubt it if you saw the cardinal-red tutu Dvorovenko's mother made for her to wear in Paquita). In one movement, Dvorovenko marches out onstage, plants herself in a very academic demi-plié in a narrow second position, as if announcing that the star had arrived and the party could begin. Elsewhere, she, and fellow "ballerinas" Yuriko Kajiya and Luciana Paris hurl themselves wildly at the ballet men, led by Gennady Saveliev, who catch and toss them in something not far from a jitterbug.

In the Upper Room has proven to be a surprise hit in a season of hits for ABT, which has been playing to sold-out houses. I have to give credit to Kevin McKenzie, who's built up a substantial audience for ABT's City Center seasons. McKenzie's taken the eclectic, something old, something new, formula of his former company, the Joffrey (it's not for nothing that two of this season's big revivals, of The Green Table and Rodeo were pillars of the Joffrey's repertory), and added the star power of his stable of international ballet greats. Although I don't necessarily approve of every choice McKenzie's made lately (like wasting the talents of the great Monique Meunier), it's hard to fault his success. Indeed, I left City Center admitting to myself that if (God forbid!) I'd purchased my own ticket, I'd have gotten more than my money's worth of great choreography and often-brilliant dancing. Yes, I'd even buy a ticket for this program; I can't think of higher praise.